1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to technology for managing or notifying the results of communication with a customer, and is applicable in a rental enterprise in which construction vehicles are loaned, for example, as a device or the like for supporting the management or notification to a responsible party of the results of communication with a customer conducted over a telephone line.
2. Description of the Related Art
Explanation will be provided below using a construction vehicle rental company as an example.
This company employs a business model in which a plurality of branch offices are distributed in different locations and each branch office possesses and operates a plurality of construction vehicles independently. Thus, inquiries concerning the availability of the construction vehicles or the like usually tend to be made to each of the branch offices by telephone. The person responsible usually deals with the inquiry, but when the person responsible is outside of the office, the person who accepts the inquiry takes a note of the content of the inquiry and informs the person responsible of the content of the noted inquiry by telephone or the like, whereupon the person responsible deals with the inquiry by calling the source of the inquiry.
In the aforementioned conventional system, however, if a telephone call containing an inquiry, a reservation or the like is placed from a customer when the sales representative who is responsible for this customer is out of the office, it is difficult to share this information with the sales representative instantly (or in other words, the sales representative is not always informed of the content of the inquiry in a timely fashion). Moreover, the content of the inquiry is not always conveyed accurately. It is therefore sometimes impossible to respond to the customer in a precise and timely fashion. For the customer, this is of course a problem which requires improvement, and since business deals maybe lost as a result, this is also a problem that the rental company would wish to see redressed.
Further, since representatives deal with inquiries individually in this conventional system, the content of the inquiries placed at each branch office are presumably not managed on a computer. If the content of inquiries placed at each of the branch offices were to be managed on a computer, the rental company as a whole would be able to learn such information as the construction vehicle for which the most inquiries were placed, and as a result business efficiency could be improved.
Also in the aforementioned conventional system, a typical customer/representative system is employed, and according to this system the results of communication are rarely learned by persons other than the responsible sales representative. Thus, even if a call center is created to deal with inquiries and reservations made in the evening and on holidays, the running thereof is difficult. For example, if a call is placed from a customer to the call center or the front desk of an outlet and a person other than the representative is informed that “I wish to rent the item I asked the price of yesterday”, there is no way to respond.
As noted above, in the aforementioned conventional system persons other than the responsible sales representative basically never learn the results of communication, and therefore an executive officer is unable to learn information such as a refusal due to lack of availability. As a result, business efficiency deteriorates.
These problems are not limited only to rental enterprises, and similar problems are likely to exist in various other business fields in which communication is conducted with customers.